Applied AI Weekly News

Justin Grammens

Welcome, Applied AI Weekly Readers, to the latest issue! I'm thrilled to once again share with you the most interesting articles on artificial intelligence that I've found this past week. I've been building up a sizable list of articles, so I've decided to empty the tank and pack this issue full of articles from the past few weeks.

This week's Applied AI Weekly covers China's AI progress with DeepSeek, new White House regulations, and OpenAI's first Super Bowl ad. 2025 is poised to be the year of AI applications, while Google enhances AI detection and IT job losses rise due to automation. Healthcare AI adoption grows alongside ethical concerns, and DeepMind’s AI outperforms Math Olympiad gold medalists, sparking debates on AI consciousness.

Before we go there, here are a few things I wish to share.

Upcoming Events

For the Spring 2025 Applied AI Conference, I'm thrilled to announce that will be partnering with MinneAnalytics. If you wish to speak at the conference, please submit your presentation ASAP through our speaker submission form. Be sure to submit TODAY!
I'll be speaking at several events this coming spring. The next is the Future of Healthcare Conference at the University of Saint Thomas. please register and join me on a panel discussing how AI will impact Healthcare with leaders from Mayo, Fairview, and UST.

A Bit of Thanks

I ran several Applied AI events this past month. First 90 Minutes of AI Inspriration. 10 dynamic speakers had just 9 minutes to captivate, educate, and inspire with their cutting-edge AI projects. Videos from the talks are HERE.
I'm continuing to offer free consultations and workshops with many business leaders on how AI is changing the landscape of how you will run your business today and into the future. Connect today and book a meeting with me.
Listen to the latest podcast episode with David Howard where discuss, Why AI Adoption is Harder Than AI Development.

Now that we have that covered, please enjoy the articles I have spent time finding and curating for you this past week.

Finally, please do reach out if there is anything you feel I might have missed. Enjoy!

News

Reinforcement Learning Heats Up, White House Orders Muscular AI Policy

The buzz over DeepSeek this week crystallized, for many people, a few important trends that have been happening in plain sight: (i) China is catching up to the U.S. in generative AI, with implications for the AI supply chain. (ii) Open weight models are commoditizing the foundation-model layer, which creates opportunities for application builders. (iii) Scaling up isn’t the only path to AI progress. Despite the massive focus on and hype around processing power, algorithmic innovations are rapidly pushing down training costs.

What AI Policy Changes Could Mean for Minnesota's Tech Future

As Minnesotans, we’re no strangers to innovation. From cutting-edge medical research to a thriving tech scene, our state has long been a hub for forward-thinking ideas. With the recent inauguration of President Donald Trump in January, it’s essential to consider how the new administration’s stance on AI regulation might impact our state’s innovators, businesses and residents.

OpenAI's CMO discusses its first Super Bowl ad

When OpenAI’s ChatGPT hit 100 million users two months after its launch in November 2022, a UBS study declared it the fastest-growing consumer application in history. Now at upwards of 400 million users, ChatGPT might be the best-known consumer product to invest the least in advertising. Historic product awareness, zero brand awareness.

2025: The Year of the AI App

What a great idea I had for the first Plaintext of 2025. After following the frantic competition between OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Anthropic to churn out brainier and deeper “frontier” foundation models, I settled on a thesis about what’s ahead: In the new year, those mighty trailblazers will consume billions of dollars, countless gigawatts, and all the silicon Nvidia can muster in their pursuit of AGI.

Creating a Common Language

MIT Associate Professor Kaiming He discusses the role of AI in interdisciplinary collaborations, connecting basic science to artificial intelligence, machine learning, and neural networks. A lot has changed in the 15 years since Kaiming He was a PhD student.

“When you are in your PhD stage, there is a high wall between different disciplines and subjects, and there was even a high wall within computer science,” He says. “The guy sitting next to me could be doing things that I completely couldn’t understand.”

DeepMind Claims Its AI Performs Better Than International Mathematical Olympiad Gold Medalists

An AI system developed by Google DeepMind, Google's premiere AI research lab, has surpassed the average gold medalist in solving geometry problems in an international mathematics competition.

Elon Musk’s DOGE Feeds AI Sensitive Federal Data to Target Cuts

The DOGE team is using AI software accessed through Microsoft’s cloud computing service Azure to pore over every dollar of money the department disburses, from contracts to grants to work trip expenses, one of the people said. Lower-level department staffers were directed by agency leadership to let Musk’s teams access the sensitive financial data, the person said.

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Business

What you should know about the Chinese start-up DeepSeek

DeepSeek has launched a chatbot that rivals ChatGPT.

Google Photos Just Got Better At Detecting AI-Generated Images.

Now, as revealed in a recent Google Photos blog post, images manipulated with Reimagine will receive an invisible embedded watermark using a Google DeepMind technology called SynthID that will alert others to the fact that AI-powered modifications are present. If a picture contains a SynthID watermark, you’ll be able to tell by checking its associated “About this image” information.

AI Is Developing Fast, but Regulators Must Be Faster

The recent open letter regarding AI consciousness on which you report (AI systems could be ‘caused to suffer’ if consciousness achieved, says research, 3 February) highlights a genuine moral problem: if we create conscious AI (whether deliberately or inadvertently) then we would have a duty not to cause it to suffer. What the letter fails to do, however, is to capture what a big “if” this is.

IT Unemployment Rises to 5.7% as AI Hits Tech Jobs

The unemployment rate in the information technology sector rose from 3.9% in December to 5.7% in January, well above last month’s overall jobless rate of 4%, in the latest sign of how automation and the increasing use of artificial intelligence are having a negative impact on the tech labor market.

Healthcare

Providing Thoughtful Leadership on AI in Medicine

The World Wide Web may seem a curiosity to some, an object of hype to many, even a danger to others,” wrote Robert Greenes, MD ’66 PhD ’70. Jerome Kassirer, then the editor-in-chief of the New England Journal of Medicine, wrote, “Although a health care delivery system that depends, even partly, on online communications holds considerable promise, the problems it poses are enormous.… For the benefit of our patients, physicians should be at the forefront of these changes, not dragged along by progress.

Development

(1) the 70% Problem: Hard Truths About AI-Assisted Coding

After spending the last few years embedded in AI-assisted development, I've noticed a fascinating pattern. While engineers report being dramatically more productive with AI, the actual software we use daily doesn’t seem like it’s getting noticeably better. What's going on here?

I think I know why, and the answer reveals some fundamental truths about software development that we need to reckon with. Let me share what I've learned.

DeepSeek and the A-Ha Moment

In the technology world, the name DeepSeek has become synonymous with innovation and disruption. This Chinese startup has made waves by developing cutting-edge AI models at a fraction of the cost required by industry giants like OpenAI and Gemini.

Suddenly, it seems, we have a way forward of building complex AI models by spending way less than what we thought was needed, and all that with chips that were not even state-of-the-art. No wonder tech stocks took a beating as the news of DeepSeek’s AI model broke.